I could have picked any specialty years ago after I passed the residency exam, but I chose geriatrics to the shock of everyone. I wanted to have the specialty with the wisest patients and even if I’m not practicing it anymore for reasons I’ll detail below, I don’t regret anything. It was impossible for elderly patients to notice my lack of white hair and my lack of wrinkles, so whenever I wasn’t in a hurry and sometimes even when I was, they would overwhelm me with advice about life in general. I was willing to listen even if I didn’t agree with everything. Besides, I learned the hard way that just because the potential to get wiser with age is there, it won’t happen by itself. Wisdom will be there in your third age only if you stretch your horizons all the time, otherwise you’ll only repeat one year again and again.
I admit that I’ve always planned my career with longevity in mind. I’m not talking about the longevity of my body, although not worsening my health for a job has certainly been important. I’m talking about the longevity of the field itself. I wanted to still be able to work no matter how old I was and I thought pivoting around fields was impossible after a certain age. I am a polymath always trying new fields, but how many years will society still tolerate this behavior? In the words of my parents, when will I grow up?
My first job was as an engineer and I was shocked to have only one older colleague. I liked the field, but at that time I couldn’t help but thinking this wasn’t a long-term career as I thought. Of course, it could have been different at other companies but I didn’t get to find that out since I started a PhD in neuroscience. I dropped out after 6 months but not before I noticed again the rarity of old people at work. I got back to Romania where I started the medical residency in geriatrics. This time, I was young and I was in the minority. Most of my colleagues were old and very old. I didn’t realize it at the time that this was because I was working in a developing country in a public institution and there was not enough willing personnel to do such a job. Anyway, I thought I found a long-term career this time. I mean, experience does matter in a physician, doesn’t it? So the older a physician gets, the better.
But here I am after graduating a medical residency in geriatrics. I’m finally a specialist but ever since passing the final exam I didn’t even search for a job in the field. I was planning to combine research on aquatic animals which don’t age with some clinical studies, but things didn’t pan out and without research in gerontology, geriatrics is nothing but palliative care and it was just sad to see people getting more decrepit and eventually dying. I never got used to seeing people dying, although I should have by now. I thought I’d finally find a career where I could get lots of intellectual stimulation and be paid for it. Where else in medicine could I manage such complex cases? People at the end of their lives have 10 diseases on average and at least 1-2 drugs for each of those. And yet by the final year of residency I had the feeling that I was only using about 5% of my brain at work. So I’m now in a sabbatical musing over what should I do next. I also got back to my first career – art – because medicine kind of stifled my creativity with all the stupid, repetitive paperwork and people who were not medically trained deciding on which lab tests and drugs would be paid by insurance.
But as I am trying to reinvent myself and find a new path, I thought I’d write this blog post on what I learned about career choice and early retirement during all these years.
I saw patients with very diverse backgrounds and realized that the kind of job you do daily can accelerate your rate of aging or not. Given that no job is without its health risks, I finally got to accept the advantage of being a polymath. Working in a lot of fields also means spreading the health risks from each of those.
Many patients I saw worked in factories and they often spoke with nostalgia about their previous workplaces. They may not agree with me, but I’m happy about automation taking over those jobs. The worst cases of age-related osteoarthritis I saw were in patients doing physical work all their lives: factory work and agriculture counted for most of these cases. I presume professional sports could be just as damaging. I presume this because I haven’t seen any geriatric patient with such a background, although they may exist in other hospitals and nursing homes.
Physical work is very hard work and it’s different from doing a regular amount of exercise which is good for health. Tending to your garden of veggies during evenings is very different from making a living by tending the fields.
When it comes to aging, people doing hard physical work may have accelerated their age-related osteoarthritis and sometimes had work accidents, but other than this they accepted retirement gracefully. Farmers especially continued to work on their plots limiting the crops they’d grow and the time they’d dedicate to it. These people didn’t always have the means to pay for their treatment and some were quite expensive (surgery, oncology therapies, biological therapies in case of autoimmune diseases), but they worked through the bureaucracy to at least get the minimum needed. Unfortunately, sometimes they didn’t succeed and they died earlier than they could have.
But there was one category of professionals for which money was not a problem to pay for age-related disease management and yet these aged very badly because of their attitude: military personnel. These were the only patients I saw for which any disease made them feel like a failure and they’d be in denial of needing medical treatment even when the latter was cheap, convenient or just affordable. These people accelerated their rate of aging because they let age-related diseases worsen much faster than needed given the current level of medical technology. I am still shocked by how many of them refused pills for managing hypertension or diabetes. Most of them perceived going to the doctor as something to be ashamed of and they didn’t want pills around their home to remind them of that as well. There was nothing I could do about that.
The military personnel had another risk which they shared with other professionals working long hours and doing nightshifts: they identified too much with their jobs and partly because of this or because of their previously cluttered schedules, found hobbies to be a waste of time. Sometimes they regarded their families in the same manner. But in most jobs there comes an age when retirement is mandatory and that is when family and hobbies can provide a sense of future and meaning. Any hobby could be developed into a second act career, but you’ll never do that if you still cling to your first identity.
The people I admire most in how they gracefully aged are teachers, especially primary teachers and college professors. In my country at least, these are people with lots of education and low salaries. I can’t know for sure, but I often wondered if being paid peanuts made them more likely to practice calorie restriction with optimal nutrition. Compared to physicians who are just as badly paid, they have their summers off and they don’t do nightshifts, so that could help in terms of not accelerating their aging. These were often people who kept on reading and learning because they loved to and because they couldn’t imagine spending their free time any other way and this helped them maintain their cognition. It’s not that they didn’t develop dementia if they lived long enough, but outside genetics, I didn’t see early forms of it like I would in people with a fixed mindset about life after retirement getting drunk every day as they didn’t see any point in living anymore.
What all these people had in common is that they aged during the 20th century. We live in the 21st century and I think there are different problems to have nowadays. For one thing, this could be the century during which aging will be solved. If this would happen, I expect people to have regular mini-retirements between each of their serial careers. Unlike the older generations, younger people already switch jobs every couple of years. But even if aging won’t be solved in humans, I expect it to be slowed down even more.
Leaving medical advances behind, one reason for which I expect Millennials to age with a better attitude is our obsession with side hustles. I’m not sure if this because there are fewer jobs thanks to automation and outsourcing or whether we need a creative outlet or whether we just search for meaningful work a lot more than our parents, but having a side hustle helps enormously in not getting too attached to a job identity. In a way, a side hustle is even better than a hobby because it has the potential to make money and once something makes you money, you are more likely to value it instead of dismissing it and it can become an additional part of your identity. Or it can just stress you more and then you’ll need another hobby or creative outlet 🙂
But there is another phenomenon unique to young people living in the 21st century: early retirement. It used to be that you either got born rich and you didn’t have to work for a living or that you got born poor and you mostly stayed there. But nowadays a small community of early retirees developed – these are frugal, young people who are saving and investing aggressively during their prime years so that they don’t have to work anymore after 5-20 years. I can relate to the long-term strategy of healthy early retirees as I find planning for the future and juggling numbers fun 🙂 Besides, given that most jobs are soul-crushing and physically unhealthy, working only on your terms is a good thing. Most polluting companies would go bankrupt if people wouldn’t have to work in those places just to put food on the table. Another good thing about this modern version of early retirement is that compared to people retiring at the mandatory retirement age, these people have a huge advantage: they didn’t spend their whole life doing one job or even in one field, so they are less likely to cling to their former identity and job title. It’s much easier to pivot at 30-40 than at 65 years old.
Yet there are two major risks about early retirement:
1. you could skimp on your health when young in order to make more money so you could save and invest aggressively when it counts most.
2. early retirement is associated with an increase in mortality and morbidity. This is more so when there are underlying health problems, but there are quite a lot of clinical studies documenting this in people who retired early because they could, not because they were sick. Not all clinical studies show this effect – please check out the references at the end of this blog post.
So how do you mitigate those two risks?
For the first part, choose your career wisely and switch fields if necessary. It is much more important to save a little when young than to save a lot when older thanks to the magic of compound interest so don’t fret much about obsessing with a high income if that worsens your health. Time lost can never be recovered, but money can – especially if you maintain your health and youth as much as possible. Otherwise, you are penny wise and pound foolish.
For the second part, retire with a plan. Retire to something meaningful instead of from a bad job or even a bad career choice. You can still be active and intellectually stimulated without a job – in some cases even more so – but these things don’t just happen. You make them happen.
It also helps to be flexible in what retirement really is: is it the last time you’ll work for a company? Or is it just the end of your first career? And just because you don’t have to work for money, it doesn’t mean you can’t if you find something interesting and on good terms.
Early retirees still form a minority, but since there is more and more talk of universal basic income because of the impending automation and how that would impact people who wouldn’t have to work, maybe there is much to learn from how this minority has fared.
If the concept of early retirement is something new to you, my favorite blog discussing this is earlyretirementextreme.com written by a former PhD nuclear astrophysicist residing in Switzerland. I also read Jacob’s book and I liked it just as much as his blog. I just love his logical way of planning his future and prizing efficiency above all.
Having arrived to the end of this blog post, here is my question to you: what do you think is the ideal age of retirement and why?
Thanks for reading!
References
Studies showing an increase of mortality and/or morbidity after (early) retirement
Studies showing no effect of (early) retirement on mortality and/or morbidity
Studies showing a decrease of mortality and/or morbidity after (early) retirement
Anca Ioviţă is the author of Eat Less Live Longer: Your Practical Guide to Calorie Restriction with Optimal Nutrition ,The Aging Gap Between Species and What Is Your Legacy? 101Ways on Getting Started to Create and Build One available on Amazon and several other places. If you enjoyed this article, don’t forget to sign up to receive updates on longevity news and novel book projects!
Don’t miss out on the Pinterest board on calorie restriction with optimal nutrition where she pins new recipes every day.
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